David Amram is celebrated as one of America’s most adventurous composers. His works embrace classical, jazz, folk, and world music traditions, transforming them into vibrant new music that reflects the eclectic energy of the modern world. Songs of the Soul—a symphony in three movements—is a passionate affirmation of life with all of its joys and sorrows. Shir L’erev Shabbat presents a modern setting of timeless Sabbath prayers. The Final Ingredient, an opera originally premiered on network TV, tells the gripping story of World War II concentration camp prisoners who struggle— and ultimately succeed—in celebrating their traditional Passover seder under inhuman conditions.

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Tenors are a breed apart, and one of the rarest categories of vocal mastery is the tenore di grazia (“tenor of grace”), which, unlike the stand-and-deliver bellowing of Verdi or Wagner, specializes in nuance, elegance, and maintaining a seemingly infinite vocal line. In music from Mozart to Rossini, this kind of singer can charm and move audiences, and the up-and-coming young sensation Nicholas Phan, now 30, has delighted audiences from Chicago to Lille with his easy high notes and warm personality. British maestro William Lacey, who conducted Phan in last year’s Houston Grand Opera production of Mozart’s Abduction From the Seraglio, praises Phan’s “distinctive quality, both as a singer and as an actor. In an era when the music schools churn out polished and rather similar singers in great quantities, Nicholas is blessed with a really individual timbre. And besides the beauty of his voice, he has the flexibility and musical intelligence to sing many different kinds of music, both on the opera stage and in the concert hall.” Even jaded critics are churning out fanzine prose about Phan.

Reviewing the same Houston production, opera critic Gary N. Reese terms Phan a “natural theatrical animal—poised, lithe, acrobatic, and supremely musical in attuning the motion of his movements to the measure of the music. Of comic opera, he appears to the manner born, with a light tenor voice inflected with subtle expression.” The website San Francisco Classical Voice concurs, describing Phan as a “remarkably relaxed young man with a voice of arresting beauty.” Indeed, listening to Phan we immediately notice how tonal beauty and subtle emotional expression are of paramount importance to his singing, the antithesis of the showy tenors who hold forth with splatteringly screamed high C’s.

At a New York bistro, Phan explains the sources of his inspiration, while sipping steaming tea. Son of a Chinese pathologist and a Greek-American housewife, Phan grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., where his father still works as a lung specialist. He developed into a friendly Midwesterner with powerful lungs indeed. With penetrating dark eyes from his mother’s Mediterranean side and delicate features from his father’s Asian background, Phan also has a yoga-trained, slim body. Whether singing Berlioz, Donizetti, Handel, Monteverdi, Offenbach, or Britten, Phan possesses a chameleon-like ability to inhabit different musical universes. Defying the moribund classical recording industry, Phan popped up recently as a coloratura rabbi in a recording of David Schiff’s opera Gimpel the Fool and as a prisoner in David A

It has been a full year since my introductory article on the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music project appeared in Fanfare 27:2, kicking off what promised to be one of the most ambitious and exciting recording ventures in recent memory. Since then, some two dozen discs have been released and distributed over the past 12 months on the Naxos label, keeping true to the project’s stated goal to deliver two CDs per month. All but one of them have been reviewed in these pages. It has been my pleasure and privilege to have been the critic of choice to receive most of these releases for review—though a few have gone to other Fanfare contributors—and I look forward to the many more that are still to come. With the five latest entries reviewed below, we reach the approximate halfway point of this musically memorable journey, which originally projected 50 CDs to be released in the first two years. Following on that, there is to be even more material, including documentary videos, essays, and monograms from leading authorities in the field, aimed largely at libraries and educational institutions…Berlinsky’s Avodat Shabbat, even made it through a difficult elimination process to reach my Want List in this edition’s annual contest. Moreover, virtually none of these CDs has been of a narrow, sectarian appeal. The music and subjects are largely universal, and easily understood and appreciated by audiences of all backgrounds and persuasions.

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